One of the standard tenets of the global warming bible is that malaria will get worse as temperatures rise. We’ve addressed this many times before, primarily by noting that the link between high temperatures and high malaria infection rates is anything but straightforward. Infectious disease expert Paul Reiter is quick to point out that malaria has been observed inside the Arctic Circle...and this is obviously not typical of a so-called “tropical” disease.

Nevertheless, the case for a malaria-temperature relationship stands on reasonably solid ground. Mosquitoes are more active at higher temperatures so they can expand their range. Biting frequency also depends on temperature, to some extent, so this should increase the infection rate, assuming the little buggers can find enough people to bite. Fairly sophisticated models have been developed that estimate the impact of weather variables on malaria infection rates. On the face of it, this seems like a reasonably solid argument.

But in a recent paper in Nature, Oxford University’s Peter Gething and colleagues from Oxford and the University of Florida took a careful look at global malaria data to see if the predicted trend was correct. They uncovered data from around the year 1900 showing where malaria was observed. These data not only show where malaria occurred, but also different categories of endemicity (in locations where the disease is continually present, the categories depict the approximate percentage of mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite). 1900 is a key time because of the lack of prior malaria intervention efforts. The authors then used a current model of the parasite’s transmission to create a map at the same scale for the year 2007. The 1900 and 2007 maps are shown in Figure 1a and 1b, respectively. It’s then a simple matter to subtract the two maps to show how malaria endemicity has changed over the last 100 plus years (in this case, this is a subtraction of categories). This is shown in the bottom Figure (1c), where red shows increasing malaria and blue decreasing malaria.

There is virtually no red on the map.

Figure 1. (enlarged here) Malaria endemicity in 1900 (a, top) and 2007 (b, middle) by increasing severity category. The difference in endemicity (c, bottom) from 1900 to 2007 indicates worsening malaria in red areas and improvements in blue (Gething et al., 2010).

If you give this issue a moment of thought, this result should be obvious. Of course malaria is not as bad now as it was 100 years ago. Global health interventions should have reduced the problem significantly.

But it has also been warming since 1900, including nearly all of the regions were malaria was endemic. Look at the problem this way: if you had available to you a) the current malaria/climate models, b) the 1900 malaria map, and c) a fairly accurate prediction of future temperatures, there is no possible way you would have predicted anything close to the map shown in Figure 1b for 2007. That’s because the climate models do not consider factors other than climate (this is also why heat-related mortality/climate model projections don’t work either).

It’s fair to say that everyone who works on this issue is pleased that malaria is less of a problem now. This speaks to the importance of intervention and awareness programs in fighting transmission. And the trend really shouldn’t be that surprising. But one might argue that regardless of the Gething et al. result, this does not mean that climate is not important.

The key part of the Nature paper, however, is the author’s attempt to quantify the effect of climate compared to other factors. To estimate these, they calculated something called the “basic reproductive number” of the malaria parasite (this is a measure of how efficiently the disease spreads within a population that has no inherent resistance to it). Even though the exact reproductive number is hard to predict, you can estimate the magnitude of the changes (also called the “effect size") that might arise from different factors, such as climate or intervention programs.

Climate projections vary, of course, depending on the models and assumptions used, but the maximum effect sizes for the year 2050 arising from climate changes are around 2 or 3 (a doubling or trebling of the reproductive number). By comparison, the observed changes in effect size (between 1900 and 2007) were much greater than the projected climate change impact. More specifically, Gething et al.

...found that, of the 66 million km2 of the Earth’s surface thought to have sustained stable/endemic malaria in 1900, 12%, 18% and 57% had exhibited proportional decreases in the reproductive number of up to one, between one and two, and greater than two orders of magnitude, respectively; 11% had shown no evidence of change; and 2% had shown evidence of an increase in the reproductive number by 2007. Although imperfect, this simple comparison illustrates that despite warming global temperatures, the combined natural and anthropogenic forces acting on the disease throughout the twentieth century have resulted in the great majority of locations undergoing a net reduction in transmission between one and three orders of magnitude [emphasis added, Eds.] larger than the maximum future increases proposed under temperature-based climate change scenarios...When compared to the substantially smaller proposed magnitude of climate-induced effects, an important and simple inference is that [climate change impacts] can be offset by moderate increases in coverage levels of currently available interventions.

In other words, if we are really interested in stopping the spread of malaria, there are more effective ways of dealing with it than undertaking draconian global legislative efforts to reduce greenhouse gas levels - the equivalent of pummeling a mosquito with a sledgehammer.

Reference:

Gething, P.W., Smith, D.L., Patil, A.P., Tatem, A.J., Snow, R.W. and S.I. Hay, 2010. Climate Change and the Global Malaria Recession. Nature, 465, 342-346

Over the weekend the New York Times reported about several Green adherents to the Rahm Emanuel call to “never let a serious crisis go to waste:”

The oil spill spreading through the Gulf of Mexico has been declared the worst environmental catastrophe ever in the United States. But for American environmentalists, the distress may also bring opportunity....

Environmentalists, for their part, are hoping that the country will pay more attention to green issues after seeing the devastation in the gulf. Already, groups are using the spill as a rallying cry. Luke Metzger, the director of Environment Texas, said that his group’s canvassers had switched their fund-raising and petitions pitch from aiding a remote mountain range to urging an end to new offshore drilling....

Another environmental group, American Rivers, is anticipating more attention to wetlands issues in general, even though oil was spilled into the sea, not rivers. “People are simply more tuned into environmental issues right now, especially when it comes to clean water,” said Amy Souers Kober, a spokeswoman for the group.

This is rich. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar just canned Liz Birnbaum, the director of the agency responsible for the oversight of oil drilling in federal waters, the Minerals Management Service. She was allegedly found to be incompetent because those who rewrite history in the Obama administration want the public to believe she was tasked with cleaning house at the corrupt MMS, but in reality she was told her top goal was to push alternative energy initiatives like the Cape Wind project.

There was little on Birnbaum’s bio that demonstrated she was up to the job. Before that she was staff director for the Committee on House Administration, but her most extensive recent experience that apparently qualified her to lead MMS was her position as a lobbyist and general counsel for...American Rivers! Now they are trying cultivate support based upon a disaster that happened on her watch.

Like I said—rich.  See post here. See how Obama will use Oval Office speech to politicize the Gulf oil disaster here. 

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BP’s Dismal Safety Record
By Pierre Thomas, Lisa A. Jones, Jack Cloherty and Jason Ryan

As the nation comes to grips with the worst oil disaster in its history, there is evidence BP has one of the worst safety track records of any major oil company operating in the United States.

In two separate disasters prior to the Gulf oil rig explosion, 30 BP workers have been killed, and more than 200 seriously injured. In the last five years, investigators found, BP has admitted to breaking U.S. environmental and safety laws and committing outright fraud. BP paid $373 million in fines to avoid prosecution.

BP’s safety violations far outstrip its fellow oil companies. According to the Center for Public Integrity, in the last three years, BP refineries in Ohio and Texas have accounted for 97 percent of the “egregious, willful” violations handed out by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

The violations are determined when an employer demonstrated either an “intentional disregard for the requirements of the [law], or showed plain indifference to employee safety and health.” OSHA statistics show BP ran up 760 “egregious, willful” safety violations, while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and Exxon had one comparable citation.

Failure to Act

After a 2005 BP refinery explosion in Texas City, Texas that killed 15 people and injured 180, a Justice Department investigation found that the explosion was caused by “improperly released vapor and liquid.” Several procedures required by the Clean Air Act to reduce the possibility of just such an explosion either were not followed, or had not been established in the first place.

BP admitted that its written procedures to ensure its equipment’s safety were inadequate, and that it had failed to inform employees of known fire and explosion risks. The company paid $50 million in criminal fines in connection with that disaster, and acknowledged violating the Clean Air Act. Jordan Barab, the deputy assistant secretary of Labor for OSHA, said BP refineries have a “systemic safety problem,” and that the tragedy in BP-Texas City “revealed serious process safety and workplace culture problems at the facility.”

Paying Fines

Yet BP never fixed the problems in Texas City. Just last October, OSHA fined the company $87 million because it has failed to correct the safety problems at the rebuilt Texas City plant. That represented the largest fine in OSHA history. In 2007, a BP pipeline spill poured 200,000 gallons of crude oil into the pristine Alaskan wilderness. In researching the environmental hazard, investigators discovered BP was aware of corrosion along the pipeline where the leak occurred but did not respond appropriately. The company was forced to pay $12 million more in criminal fines for the spill, in addition to another $4 million to the state of Alaska.

Manipulating The Market

BP’s infractions were more than environmental. The Justice Department required the company to pay approximately $353 million as part of an agreement to defer prosecution on charges that the company conspired to manipulate the propane gas market. Investigators from the Justice Department found that some BP traders were stockpiling propane, which forced the market prices to skyrocket. After their incriminating conversations about controlling the market were caught on tape, three BP traders were indicted.

The alleged price gouging affected as many as 7 million propane customers who depended on propane to heat their homes and cost the consumers $53 million. But for a company that reported profits of $14 billion in 2009, the fines represent a small fraction of the cost of doing business.

See post here. See new story on how Documents Show BP Cut Corners in Days Before Blowout here.

BP played a major role in drafting the Kerry-Lieberman bill (here) and when ironically the accident occured was finalist for an award from the Obama administration for their ‘safety record’. The “political stupidity is unbelievable,” Democratic strategist James Carville said on “Good Morning America”. You can’t make this stuff up.

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Some Good News: U.S. Northeast Carbon Permits Draw Record Low Price
By Simon Lomax, Bloomberg

Carbon dioxide permits in the U.S. Northeast’s cap-and-trade program tumbled to a record low price at auction amid a surplus of the pollution rights and doubts that Congress will create a national emissions market this year.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative sold 40.7 million permits for $1.88 each, 19 cents lower than the last auction held in March and 2 cents above the minimum allowable bid, the cap-and-trade program said on its website today. Each permit in the carbon trading program for power plants from Maryland to Maine represents one ton of carbon dioxide.

Those permits come from the regional carbon trading program’s first phase, or “control period,” from 2009 to 2011. This week’s auction, held June 9 with the results withheld until today, also offered 2.14 million permits from the 2012-to-2014 control period. They went for $1.86.

“Prices are a lot lower than expected,” Tim Cheung, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance in New York, said in a telephone interview. “Demand for power hasn’t increased with the economic recovery and that means there’s an oversupply of permits in the market.”

Permit Surplus

The surplus of permits, also called allowances, is due to the gap between actual carbon dioxide output from power plants and the number of permits being issued by the Northeast states. The states decided in 2005 how many permits to issue and left room for emissions to rise before the 2009 start of the cap-and- trade program. Instead, emissions fell as the economy slowed.

The auction price for permits peaked at $3.51 in March 2009 as Democrats in the U.S. House were preparing federal cap-and- trade legislation that would suspend the Northeastern market and convert its surplus permits into federal allowances.

Speculation that Northeastern pollution permits could be converted into federal allowances drew “financial players” such as banks and hedge funds into the Northeastern carbon market, Paul Tesoriero, director of environmental trading at Evolution Markets LLC in White Plains, New York, said in a telephone interview.

When the cap-and-trade legislation narrowly passed the House and stalled in the Senate, those “high hopes” faded and “you’re seeing the financial players not participating” in the market alongside the power plants that have to buy the carbon dioxide permits to keep running, Tesoriero said. “If there was another layer of financial players, there’d be more demand in the market,” he said.

With the “low probability” of Congress enacting a federal cap-and-trade market for carbon dioxide this year, prices are falling closer to $1.86 faster than expected, he said. “Everyone in the market knows this thing is heading to $1.86; it’s just when are we going to get there.” In secondary market trading, December-delivered permits fell 10 cents, or 4.9 percent, to a record low of $1.96 each on the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange. See the story here.

The science around climate change is not as settled as it’s presented as being. I used to think it was, until about 2003 - and then, feeling that the remedies being proposed for climate change would be more damaging to the environment than climate change itself, I took it upon myself to look at the science.

In my book on biodiversity, Beyond Conservation, I had mentioned in one of the chapters that perhaps the man-made global warming theory was not all it was being cracked up to be. The changes we are seeing now, I wrote, suggested that some other processes were at work. I then took time out, visited the science libraries, and checked the original science upon which today’s models are based.

I was shocked by what I found. Firstly, there’s no real consensus among the scientists in the UN working groups, especially around oceanography and atmospheric physics. The atmospheric physics of carbon dioxide for example is presented as being pretty straightforward: it is a greenhouse gas, therefore it warms up the planet. But even that isn’t settled. There’s a huge amount of scientific disagreement on how much extra heating in the atmosphere you will get from carbon dioxide. It is even broadly accepted that carbon dioxide on its own is not a problem. So, you can double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and get half to one degree warming, which is within the natural variability range over a period of 50 years from now at the current rate of emissions.

The role of water vapour in planetary warming is also open to questioning. While it is presented as being a heat amplifier, in fact because it can turn into cloud it could actually regulate temperature instead. As it turned out, at the very beginning of the UN discussions, Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, and a leading expert appointed to the committee because of his meteorological expertise, was saying precisely that: the amplification effect asserted cannot be relied upon to increase warming because the vapour could turn into cloud. This needed to be proved before basing assumptions on it. But Lindzen was overruled. Despite still being a key part of the IPPC process, he is now vilified by the press and by the environmental movement. So even on the most basic science of the atmospherics, there is doubt.

Or take oceanography. Most of the heat of the planet is not contained in the atmosphere; it is in the oceans. And what happens in the oceans is absolutely vital to the dynamics of heat moving around the planet. So while of course it is possible to warm up the planet to an additional extent as a result of human activity, if the planet then lets more heat out than it would normally do, then it will balance out. That is to say, you have only to produce less cloud over the oceans and the oceans will release heat to space. Like CO2 itself, the atmosphere doesn’t actually hold heat - it simply delays its transmission to space.

The real dynamic of the planet is to do with clouds, yet this area of science - oceanography and cloud cover - is incredibly uncertain. When I first looked at the basic science, the findings were surprising. Over the global warming period - which I limit to the past 50 or so years - the globe didn’t warm at all between 1950 and 1980, even though carbon dioxide emissions were going through the roof due to the postwar expansion of industry; global temperatures stayed pretty much flat.

The real global warming took off in the 1980s and 90s, through to about 2005. (In the last 10 years it’s actually plateaued.) That period of 25 years, from around 1980 to 2005, coincided with changes in the ocean and cloud cover - that is, there was less cloud and more sunlight getting through to the ocean. And this can be seen in the satellite data on the kind of energy that’s coming through (short-wave energy, which is the only energy that heats water - infra-red energy coming from CO2 cannot heat water). So when you look at the real-world data, the warming of that entire period seems to be due to additional sunlight reaching the oceans.

In 2007, I put out a report on this, in the hope of getting feedback before I published my book, Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory. Since then, top scientists at NASA have agreed that this period of warming over the past 25 years is entirely due to the short-wave radiation from sunlight, with the ocean transferring that heat to the land.

So the crucial question is: has the cloud thinning been due to carbon dioxide? Or is it part of a cycle? If you ask some of the top people at NASA - that is, the people who interpret all the satellite data - they will say it’s 50-50. So you could say the greenhouse effect has warmed the oceans and the warmer oceans have thinned the clouds. But that is still just a hypothesis, it is not a proven scientific fact. That means you could assert with equal validity that thinning clouds have warmed the oceans, which has led to global warming - meaning the effect of carbon dioxide is minimal.

There is a fairly easy way of deciding between the two viewpoints: you look at the history of climate to find out whether there has been warming and cooling in the past, before carbon dioxide became such an issue. And of course there have been cycles of warming and cooling, with the longest of the cycles lasting about a thousand years and the shortest cycle - El Nino - about four-to-eight years.

So, right now, we are at the peak of a thousand-year cycle. We also had a peak for all the other cycles between 1995 and 2005. Given that these cycles have peaked, temperature-wise, before, one can look at what happened back then. A thousand years ago, for instance, the Vikings were growing crops on Greenland, which assumes that the summer ice would have been more limited than it is now. The Arctic melted down a thousand years ago, just as it did 2,000 years ago. What’s astonishing is that you can see all of that in the ice-core record in Greenland. And in each cycle of a thousand years, the peak is getting lower. So overall the planet is actually cooling, from a peak about 8,000 years ago.

Now the only way in which you can get cycles of warming and cooling on such a scale is through the oceans. And the only way that can happen is in relation to cloud cover. So the crucial question then is, how do the oceans vary their cloud cover? What creates these cycles? There is a major scientific controversy over how the sun’s magnetic field influences the different types of energy that reach the planet, and how they, in turn, influence cloud cover. There are several different scientific teams working on it, including one from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). What this shows is that it is still an unresolved question. Nobody knows what the mechanisms are.

So why is the UN saying what it is saying? Well, if you actually look at the wording of what this so-called consensus of scientists has produced, then you will see that they believe that ‘global warming is not due to known natural causes acting alone’. This is clever wording. It means that the door is open to an unknown mechanism driving the warming. So although it is well known that the warming is naturally driven, the mechanism is not.

Why would the UN suppress all of this debate happening within its working groups? The problem is that the secretariat within the UN tasked with processing this debate is already committed - financially - to focusing upon carbon dioxide as the climate-change driver. It is very hard for them to backtrack.

It is only recently that the scientific world has bought into this consensus. In 2001, America, Russia and China did not accept the UN’s analysis. But by 2004, America had signed up to it. And this was all down to a certain team in the US which produced an analysis that ironed out the past cycles of warming and cooling. Although it has since been discredited, this report had a tremendous effect in bringing scientific institutions around to the idea of man-made global warming.

So behind the appearance of consensus and settled science, there is now this tremendous battle going on. The dissenting scientists are described by certain journalists and environmentalists as ‘denialists’ and ‘sceptics’ funded by the oil industry. This is simply not the case. There are top-level atmospheric physicists, oceanographers and solar scientists who do not agree that the case is proven for global warming. Nobody is seriously saying that carbon dioxide has no effect whatsoever, but the defenders of the faith, as it were, set up a straw man. ‘These people’, they say, ‘think carbon dioxide has no effect’. Only a lunatic fringe thinks that.

The critical scientists are simply saying that carbon dioxide’s effect is small, at most 20 per cent. This means that even a 50 per cent reduction by 2050 in manmade greenhouse gas emissions would only reduce the driving force of climate change by 10 per cent. That’s because the natural driving force will determine the climate. As I argue in Chill, if you look at all the past cycles, the temperature declines after a peak. And this decline will bring with it wholly different problems - ones which, so far, we are woefully underprepared for.

What’s really disconcerting for me is that I am a longstanding environmentalist. As part of environmental groups I’ve helped to prevent nuclear waste from being dumped in the ocean, I’ve helped change emergency planning for nuclear reactors, and I’ve also helped develop biodiversity strategy. I’m as green as you can get. But what I am faced with now is environmental groups and major NGOs - Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF, even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds - which have allied themselves with the state. They talk about so-called denialists allying themselves with ‘Big Oil’, but they have fallen into the arms of big government. They’ve allied with disreputable prime ministers; they’ve allied with chief policy advisers who have never got anything right in their lives; they’ve allied themselves with scientific institutions that have never led on any of these environmental issues.

If you write something, as I have done with Chill, which is a rational, critical appraisal of the whole situation, you would at least expect to have some dialogue. But there has been nothing. I haven’t had a single invitation to speak to any of these groups. Even universities have been reticent. I have been invited to speak at Leeds University, which has quite a strong climate community, and the Energy Institute. But the environmental community has been absolutely silent towards me. I would challenge them to bring all of their experts to the table and hammer it out.

We’re seeing the dangerous development here of a very intolerant political ideology. It is a very strange political and scientific situation, in which vast sums of money are underwriting a bureaucracy of climate accountants and auditors, and in which academic funding is easier to obtain if you put man-made climate change at the top of your research proposal. I have never seen anything like it in the 40 years of my scientific and environmental career.

Peter Taylor is author of Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory.

There’s enough snow to open a run at Mount Washington, shown in February, next weekend.

Photographed by: Darren Stone, Times Colonist, Times Colonist

A cool, wet spring has brought an unexpected benefit—Mount Washington plans to open for summer skiers and snowboarders next weekend, a first in its 32-year history. “How often can you say you’ve skied on the Island in June?” said resort spokesman Brent Curtain. “We’re allowing people the opportunity to do it.”

The rare chance to hit the slopes in a T-shirt is courtesy of a recent spate of unseasonably wet weather, which means less snow than expected has melted since the resort closed in late April. As a result, there’s enough snow to open the Linton’s Loop run on the Eagle Express chair. At the top, there’s as much as two metres of snow, said Curtain. “There’s been no sun, and snow melts a lot quicker when you have some sunshine and warmer temperatures,” he said. “Even with rain, if there’s cloud cover and rain, it’s not going to melt as quick.”

The summer ski session caps a banner year for Mount Washington. The resort was blanketed with more than 15 metres of snow from November 2009 to April 2010—the second-deepest amount in history. Mount Washington had a top-five year in terms of business, said Curtain.

Resort officials aren’t sure what the turnout will be for the summer ski weekend, or whether Mount Washington will turn a profit, said Curtain. “This wasn’t a venture to make a bunch of money or a weekend to be a cash grab. It’s more of a, ‘You know, we can do this,’ “ he said. “We’ve joked about it in past years when you’ve closed the season with a lot of snow and you joke, ‘God, imagine summer operations if we had enough snow to ski.’

“We always say that but you get the warm two-week stretch in May and then the snow disappears pretty quick.” The summer ski weekend runs 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 19 and 20. A lift ticket costs $25. Dads pay only $10 on Father’s Day Sunday if they bring their kids. Rentals are available. Because the weekend is considered a special event, the resort said season’s tickets are not being honoured.

The meltdown of the Himalayan glaciers is not going to be nearly as dire as a Nobel Prize-winning UN climate panel predicted, but it does still threaten the water and food security of 60 million people, says a new report.

Glaciers are often described as the “water towers” of the world, and the UN has warned that the glaciers feeding major Asian river basins - and providing water for 1.4 billion people - are fast disappearing as a result of climate change. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which co-won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, went so far as to say that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035 - which UN officials now admit was a mistake.

A study published Friday in the journal Science shows the report got more than the 2035 date wrong. It says the 2007 IPCC report also overstated and oversimplified the impact Himalayan glaciers have on Asian rivers.

Glacier meltwater plays only a “modest role” in the several major river systems in Asia, says the study by a Dutch team that took a close look the rivers downstream from the enormous Himalayan snow and ice fields.

“Meltwater is extremely important in the Indus basin and important for the Brahmaputra basin, but plays only a modest role for the Ganges, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers,” reports the team led by Walter Immerzeel at Utrecht University.

“A huge difference also exists between basins in the extent to which climate change is predicted to affect water availability and food security,” the study says. “The Brahmaputra and Indus basins are most susceptible to reductions of flow, threatening the food security of an estimated 60 million people.”

Though the study says global warming will lead to substantial changes in glaciers, it says the “impact will be less than anticipated” by the IPCC’s 2007 report. “In that report, it was suggested that the current trends of glacier melt and potential climate change may cause the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, and other rivers to become seasonal rivers in the near future,” the Dutch team says. “We argue that these rivers already are seasonal rivers, because the melt and rain seasons generally coincide and a decrease in meltwater is partially compensated for by an increase in precipitation.”

The study helps set the record straight, says glaciologist Graham Cogley, at Trent University, in Peterborough, Ont. “They are probably in the right ballpark,” he says.

Cogley, like many scientists involved with the IPCC, was dismayed the panel’s report contained the unsupported claim that Himalayan glaciers “are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.” UN officials have acknowledged the mistake, which overstated by several hundred years when the glaciers could melt away.

“It was a first-class disaster,” says Cogley, says of the mistake. He says some scientists saw the error and tried to alert senior authors, but it was “too late” to get the report corrected.

Cogley says he hopes that the fiasco - and the toll it has taken on the IPCC’s credibility - will lead to better co-ordination and cross-checking between the groups of thousands of scientists who will soon start work on the next UN climate change report.

He also says referring to the Himalayan glaciers as the “water towers” of Asia is “all right in a hand-waving sort of way.” But Cogley, like the Dutch team, notes that rainfall and snowfall often play a more important role than glacier meltwater in keeping rivers flowing. “The elementary point is that the farther you go downstream from a glacier, the less their relative importance,” says Cogley.

The meltdown of the Himalayan glaciers is not going to be nearly as dire as a Nobel Prize-winning UN climate panel predicted, but it does still threaten the water and food security of 60 million people, says a new report.

Read more here.